Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.
—Stanley Marcus, former president,
Neiman Marcus
EVERY DAY WE COMMUNICATE THE WAY WE THINK BY THE way we speak. Whether through spoken dialogue, written communication, or symbols and gestures, language is one of the most important ways to create and share meaning of the world around us. The name we give something frames our perspective, even changing the meaning by the label we assign it. This is why every time I hear the word “consumer,” a term so common in our everyday language, a part of me winces.
The use of the word “consumer” is almost unavoidable in marketing. But to most businesspeople a consumer is an entity that promotes economic advancement through the purchases of goods and services, not a real-life person with feelings, dreams, goals, and aspirations. If you told your “average consumers” they were being defined that way, they would be irritated, not allured. This “consumer” label is often assumptive, counterproductive, and terribly misguided. And, reducing people to other marketing labels that strip them of their humanity and diminish empathy—such as “buyers,” “laggards,” or “eyeballs”—is equally unhelpful. Perhaps the greatest offense is that it presupposes a behavior that has yet to be earned by the marketer. For marketers, the first step in better understanding the target audience is to better define them, recognizing that people do a lot more than consume. If we continue to sell to people merely as purchasers of products and not as the perceptive, essentially human beings they are, we will be the ones demonstrating poor communication skills before the advertising is even created.
Unfortunately, marketers spend an inordinate amount of effort identifying and tracking consumer and cultural trends that are often fleeting and dynamic, instead of understanding the constant and relatively unchanging, innate human needs that are behind those trends. As the American biologist Edward O. Wilson put it, “The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool.”1
Because evolution happens at an imperceptibly gradual pace, it is often the oldest parts, not the new and improved advancements, of human cognition that drive our daily decisions. Human insights are the enduring truths that can unify marketing efforts and cut across a broad array of varying segments, widening appeal while providing ongoing relevance over time. Unlike consumer needs, human needs run much deeper and have primary influence on behavior change.
The goal of most humans is to satisfy their own needs and drives, not to consume your product. By using the term “consumer,” marketers are suggesting a company-out perspective that implies hubris on the part of their strategy. It precludes a deeper understanding of why people are motivated to buy and what it takes to gain their trust and make the sale. This marketers’ perspective violates the prime directive of marketing strategy by emphasizing corporate interest over customer benefit. This may seem counterintuitive at first. So much of marketing is aimed at making the specific sale, but, as I aim to demonstrate, to gain a more in-depth understanding of consumer behaviors, we need first to raise our sightline and define our potential customers more broadly. After all, we are not always consumers of certain brands but we are always Homo sapiens—regardless of the product category under inquiry.
After the inception of the genus Homo around 2.4 million years ago, our ancestors lived for approximately 84,000 generations as hunter-gatherers. By comparison, there have been only a mere 7 generations of the industrial age. Our species lived for well over 99 percent of our evolution in hunter-gatherer societies.2 Our wants and needs are many millennia in the making, long before the product, brand, or category ever existed. Our minds were designed to solve the problems hunter-gatherers faced, not the problems of modern day consumers. This is why when we narrowly define people as consumers, we draw attention to the present relationship between a target audience and product category, ignoring all of the evolutionary influences that have shaped our brains and behavior, and which still influence so much of that relationship today.
Around 200,000 years ago, and following millions more of evolution, modern humans first appeared during the Pleistocene epoch, living in small nomadic bands foraging the savannas of eastern Africa.3 Life for these early humans was like being on a camping trip, although a lot more arduous, one that lasted a lifetime without the ability to buy much-needed supplies at REI.4 Our advanced industrial age, in which we live sedentary lives in climate-controlled houses, shopping at supermarkets, eating fast foods, and watching television, is not even a century in the making. This lifestyle that feels so permanent is nothing but a tiny blip on the radar screen of humanity. To put our times into even greater perspective, the digital age has been with us for a mere two generations. We have gone from aim-and-throw hunters to point-and-click shoppers in an instant, but that doesn’t change the fact that our brains remain better suited to Amazon-like rainforests than to amazon.com-like websites. As evolutionary psychologists put it, “Our modern skulls house stone age minds.”5
That’s because as much as we might be in the twenty-first century, the cognitive structures and mental programs that evolved and adapted throughout the Pleistocene environments live on within us today. These brain mechanisms have primary influence on how we behave in our world even though they were designed for very different environments and circumstances. Though we no longer live in an environment for which our minds were designed, our brains behave much as though we do. Natural selection, or what we commonly refer to as evolution, moves at a glacial pace even if our lifestyle is changing at light speed. It is a very slow process, and it hasn’t had enough generations to design circuits adapted to a postindustrial society. But since the environment in which we live continues to rapidly change, the problem remains: We are in fact moving faster than our own brains.6
This is why instead of simply charting what people buy, we need to begin to examine the real motives behind why they buy. Although shopping for goods and services is a relatively new behavior for our species, the ancient brain circuits that guide us to select the right nutritional options and resources remain intact. In essence, the basic strategies for foraging on the plains of the Serengeti are much like those used today at Wal-Mart. When people choose only their brand of cereal, for instance, it is not unlike picking familiar roots, fruits, tubers, nuts, grains, and seeds while foraging. These are the safe choices, proven to avoid pain and predict pleasure.
Though it may seem ironic that anxiety and fear are the primary motivators of our pursuit of well-being, the evolutionary process is largely driven by harm avoidance. Back in the Pleistocene, choosing unusual and potentially poisonous fruits or plants meant possible sickness or, in the worst case, death. Even if the stakes aren’t as high today, the behavior remains. We don’t like to stray from the safety of our daily routine. The trusted, proven products we choose and our loyalty to those brands are in part modern day artifacts of our Pleistocene past.
Like brand new automobiles, humans come with a built-in set of stock features that are standard from the factory, traits and characteristics with which we are all born. All humans have what evolutionary psychologists call evolved psychological mechanisms—inborn behavioral capacities that drive automatic, unconscious decisions. These cognitive mechanisms, such as reciprocal altruism, rituals, territoriality, collective decision making, coalition formation, predator avoidance, food selection, mate choice criteria, and intrasexual competition, play primary roles in a vast array of our enduring behaviors. These evolved psychological mechanisms often generate immediate behavioral responses that occur without thinking, based upon a narrow slice of information, much as catching a glimpse of a snake will make your body jump before your head even has time to consciously process what just happened.
For decades much of the social sciences have subscribed primarily to a tabula rasa view of human behavior. That is, the mind is born as a blank slate, without any rules for processing data, whose structure is formed by experience, through parenting, socialization, culture, etc. Marketers have followed suit in their approach, focusing their attention almost exclusively on cultural and marketplace factors, putting their eggs in the nurture basket while virtually ignoring the natural influences and the biology with which we are born. Advertisers predominantly obsess and become distracted by the hottest new trends in social media, technology, fashion, music, entertainment, and by what is currently selling in the market, paying little-to-no attention to the deeper, enduring truths of our basic human wants, needs, and desires. But as Tim Mahoney, executive vice president and chief product and marketing officer at Volkswagen of America, points out, “As marketers we sometimes get preoccupied with new shiny things. That can be dangerous. Above all, marketing is about tapping into human insight.”7
There is so much more to our behavior than culture alone can explain. As Allen D. MacNeill, a senior lecturer in biology at Cornell University, puts it, “Contrary to the assertions of many social scientists, human behavior is not infinitely malleable nor explainable in purely cultural terms.”8 In fact, more recent discoveries in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology do not support a blank slate point of view. It now appears that virtually all behavior has both innate and learned components. According to Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, “the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don’t depend on information coming in from the senses.” Pinker adds, “Behavior may vary across cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary. Intelligent behavior is learned successfully because we have innate systems that do the learning.”9
In many ways treating people as otherworldly, separate from and unrelated to other animal species, has impeded our discovering a more in-depth, empirical understanding of our own behavior. Ethology, the study of animal behavioral patterns in natural environments, has offered revelatory insights into human behavior because it makes no such assumptions. Though marketers do not need to become zoologists in order to understand human behavior, we find that by observing natural patterns in other animals we can begin to learn key insights into our own evolution. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for example, was largely inspired by the variety and change in the dogs he observed in childhood and the finches he encountered on his trip to the Galapagos Islands.
The renowned psychologist and expert on the science of influence Robert Cialdini introduced marketers to the unconscious catalysts of consumer behavior in his seminal book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. By first drawing a comparison to what ethologists refer to as “fixed action patterns”—automatic, preprogrammed behavioral responses in animals to certain stimuli—he was able to show how humans often work from similar fixed patterns. In Cialdini’s example, he writes of an experiment in which a mother turkey hen, who typically exhibits a tendency to huddle, warm, and care for any nearby baby chick when she hears its cheep-cheep chirping sounds, is thrown into confusion when the protection trigger is exploited. To study this phenomenon, scientists equipped an inanimate stuffed polecat, the turkey’s natural enemy, with the electronically recorded sounds of a chirping turkey chick. In Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, the mother would huddle and tend to the polecat when the cheep-cheep sounds were emitted, but when the sounds were turned off she would violently attack the stuffed animal. The thin slice of information provided by the sign stimulus of the chirping sound, the essential feature needed to trigger the response, was enough to override all other sensory input, making the turkey literally blind to its own enemy.
The question remains: If an animal can be preprogrammed to react to a specific environmental feature, can humans be preprogrammed in a similar fashion? For instance, is it possible that humans respond to certain essential features in marketing? And can we reject an advertisement that violates these rules or accept one that recognizes and leverages them? Are there unconscious triggers that both marketers and consumers are unaware of? And if so, what are they and how can they be recognized and utilized to create stronger bonds with brands? Can we begin to recognize the presence of evolved psychological mechanisms in our marketing programs, such as the coalition formation and territoriality of brand clubs and loyalty programs, or the predator avoidance phenomenon of angry bloggers who warn their digital tribes of the perilous deception of unscrupulous marketers?
As it turns out, humans have automaticity, too, derived from both nurture and nature: that is, involuntary innate tendencies and learned social norms in response to environmental stimuli that occur without the awareness and effort of consciousness. As our lives become busier and more complex, we are more likely to blindly obey these stereotypical rules of thumb that make our decisions for us. A process that happens all the time, it will happen more often in an increasingly complex environment.
For example, the power of market leadership and #1 brand status is largely explained by the prevailing human truth of our herd mentality—when in doubt do what everyone else is doing, or what Cialdini calls “social proof,” the tendency to follow the lead of others. This proclivity has been reenforced over thousands of years of evolution within hunter-gatherer societies, among groups of people whose opinions mattered to each other’s survival. The reason Toyota Camry continues to be the best-selling passenger car in America is largely due to the fact that so many owners have demonstrated their commitment, a trust that persists even despite recent safety concerns and product recalls for the brand.10
Another such mental heuristic is the social norm expensive equals good. Much like the turkey hen’s belief that a cheep-cheep sound is a signal to protect, humans will believe that when you want to get the best, you should get the most expensive. Not surprisingly, this thought process, if we are not careful, can result in cozying up to a polecat. We think we are getting one thing when really we are getting another, but experience has taught us that “you get what you pay for,” and so we are seduced by the cheep-cheep of a not-so-cheap product. This heuristic can make us pay as much as 85 percent more for a brand-name drug than for the generic, even though the FDA requires generic drugs to have the exact same quality and performance.11
Stella Artois leveraged this heuristic to great ends, counterintuitively highlighting its higher price point as an advantage, positioning the otherwise run-of-the-mill beer in Belgium as a premium import in the US. The brand grew tremendously in America while touting the tagline developed by Lowe and Partners Advertising, “Perfection has its price.”12 Not a bad thing for consumers or for Stella, since “average” by Belgian standards is in fact quite premium for American tastes. But this generalization also makes us pay more for a bottle of wine from a premium winemaker even though it sells virtually the same wine under a second label for much less. It makes us feel sophisticated about our more expensive choice to opt for the high-end Vera Wang gown as opposed to simply feeling smart for buying the more approachable and casual Simply Vera counterpart available at Kohl’s retail stores. Whether it’s a handbag or a pair of shoes or even a box of cereal, we feel better about our decision because we pay a higher price. Conversely, if you are wearing a fake Rolex watch, it doesn’t really feel as good to you because you know you paid only 50, not 5,000. Your awareness counts. Our views of the world and brands are based on beliefs often informed by these cognitive shortcuts.
These mental shortcuts were designed to help us navigate a complex and often precarious world where we constantly needed to make decisions without taxing our conscious mind. But there are instances when following the convention or the herd can backfire, like the turkey that cuddles her enemy or the consumer who selects the wrong brand.
Perhaps one of the most potent human-compliance triggers is reciprocation, to repay in kind whenever possible for what another person has done or provided for us.13 Charles Darwin believed that reciprocity was the foundation of moral behavior in humans. From social grooming in primates (“I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine”), to religious doctrine (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”),14 when we are given something or something is done for us, we feel naturally compelled to return the favor. The origins for this altruism lie deep in our evolutionary history. Infants as young as 18 months old display altruistic behavior, and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, also show evidence of rudimentary helping behavior. According to German researchers in a study reported in the journal Science, altruism may have evolved about 6 million years ago among a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.15
Reciprocal altruism can also drive market economies, like the massive uptick in sales due to holiday gift-giving, which is largely a function of this genetic predisposition. Marketers have also been exploiting this trigger seemingly forever in the guise of the free sample or the trial offer. By giving you that small tube of toothpaste, there is a small part of us that feels obligated to consider that flashy new whitening formulation. When the nice woman at the grocery store offers us a free sample of cheese, we feel guilty eating and running, and sometimes relieve that anxiety by finding our way over to the cheese section to comply with the suggestion. Kapil Bawa of Baruch College and Robert Shoemaker of New York University have reported empirical findings that suggest that, “unlike other consumer promotions such as coupons, free samples can produce measurable long-term effects on sales.”16 To illustrate how pervasive and natural this tendency is, a university professor sent Christmas cards to a group of complete strangers, and holiday cards came pouring back to him even though he had never known or met these people.17
Throughout evolution, people bond with or reject people, not companies. Based on their past interactions with the representatives of the goods and services they wish to obtain, they will reward the good and punish the bad. It is this human truth that drives the success of customer service standouts like Nordstrom and Ritz-Carlton. Whether company representatives are nice to customers or whether they treat them poorly, people will automatically repay them in kind as a form of today’s checks and balances in free market economies.
While evolutionary biologists refer to this tendency as reciprocal altruism,18 cultural anthropologists call it the web of indebtedness. Either way, this unique adaptive mechanism binds individuals into efficient collective units with a division of labor, allowing for diverse, mutual exchanges of goods and services.19 In all foraging societies, sharing was a universal characteristic that regulated access to things like food, material goods, and land. These reciprocal exchanges among people are the hallmarks of all human civilization and the antecedents to the trade and commerce of the industrial age enjoyed today.20
These mechanisms can also guide brand and product choices. For example, the green or eco-friendly movement can be largely explained by a similar evolved tendency that evolutionary psychologists call competitive altruism. This predisposition for cooperative, procommunity behaviors such as philanthropy, buying a Prius, or installing fuel-efficient light bulbs confers the benefits of good reputations among our social peers. Studies have shown these altruistic individuals are more likely to achieve higher status, especially those who display their altruism publicly.21
Instead of focusing on ephemeral cultural expressions and product category trends, i.e., consumer behavior, we need to first step back and understand these human universals. What are the enduring tendencies of all human life and not just the lifecycles of our products and marketplace categories? How do these tendencies cross cultures and span the history of our species? And how do they direct choice today? How can we use that understanding to best connect with these aged instincts and evolved minds to form powerful brands?
Brands that own claims to fundamental human truths can experience immeasurable growth and market share dominance. AT&T in the 1980s, despite its monopoly and stranglehold on the telecommunications industry, fondly found its way into the hearts of Americans through a campaign that reminded people to “Reach out and touch someone.” This long-standing effort branded the behemoth by not just connecting our phone calls but plugging into our inherently social nature and deep-rooted need for human connection. And more recently, in 2010 Adweek declared “Get a Mac” (also known as “Mac versus PC”) to be the best advertising campaign of the first decade of the new century.22 This long-running series of 66 television spots helped make Apple the world’s most valuable brand by 2012.23
Apple, once a niche player for creative types, established its core via the territoriality and coalition formation of different thinkers and status quo rejecters, creating an exclusive community of independent-minded people who prided themselves on this distinction. The brand grew to be mainstream by appealing to the universal human need for social status, by personifying Apple face-to-face with the competition. Who would you rather hang out with, the unflappably cool Mac hipster or the bumbling, boring PC dolt? “Get a Mac” positioned the brand not just as a better product with its endearing yet competitive product proof points but also as an ever-expanding cooler club of people.
Two of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby from the University of California, Santa Barbara, describe the rapidly growing field of evolutionary psychology as “based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives . . . and specialized interpretation systems—programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.”24 Evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban explained to me in a 2011 interview that the human mind is a lot like a smartphone preloaded with many discrete apps with narrow specific functions that run simultaneously, often without our awareness and at times in conflict with each other. These mental apps are designed to drive us to do things like seek food, strive for status, stay fit, avoid predators, be honest, or trick people.25
To ignore these universal mental programs is to overlook some of the most fundamental ways to understand and change behavior. We all share a universal biology or “evolved architecture,” in part because we all share common ancestry. As the anthropologist Curtis Marean indicates, “The genetic record shows us that we are all descended from a small population of approximately 600 breeding individuals.” While there may be disagreement about when and how many, it does seem that everyone on earth today is descended from a small original population in Africa.26 It may sound trite, but it’s true: We are all one. The more you go back in time, the closer the relationship gets. So if we really want to accurately chart the demographics of our target audience in the United States, perhaps we should net together the subcategories of Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, and Other into one larger all-inclusive grand net labeled “African Americans,” because everyone in the world originally came out of Africa. There really is only one race: the human race.
Have you ever wondered why we really love and derive so much pleasure from eating food? Though food is perhaps one of the most important resources in sustaining life, so is oxygen, and yet we don’t love or crave air. We value food not just because it’s important but also because for most of our species’ history it has been very difficult to obtain. Air on the other hand is abundant and everywhere.27 Those circumstances form the basis of our emotional desires. We want that which is both important and that which is scarce, which explains why the essence of every good brand strategy is importance plus uniqueness—or, stated another way, motivation plus differentiation.
Driven by evolutionary need, we are influenced by the things we want and the preferences we inherit. For example, in our history, humans who were highly motivated by their emotional desire for obtaining food were conferred an advantage over those who were less driven to endure the expenditures needed to obtain this critical resource. These individuals were most likely to survive and pass on their culinary love affair to their children, a trend that was reinforced generation after generation. It’s no surprise that today we still think of “needing” food when more often than not we really just “want” to eat.
In 2010, hamburger giant McDonald’s generated more than 32 billion in US sales.28 The tremendous success of the fast-food industry is not solely based on the marketing prowess of heavyweight advertisers like McDonald’s Corp. Much of the food offered at these restaurants is based on our inherited preferences developed over evolution’s timeline. As David Buss, one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, says, “We have not evolved any genes for McDonald’s, but the foods we eat there reveal the ancestral strategies for survival we carry with us today.”29
These taste preferences are based in foods high in fat, sugar, and salt, because in most of our evolutionary past these were essential nutrients to our survival. Early humans’ daily activities consisted of procuring food and water, interacting socially, escaping from predators, and maintaining shelter and clothing, all of which required significant expenditures of energy. These everyday toils involved navigating miles of arduous and often challenging terrain, requiring sugar and fat to meet these physical and mental demands. Humans’ high metabolic requirements for these high-energy foods were a result of not just intense physical demands but also intense cognitive requirements. That’s because compared to other species, primates, especially humans, have more highly developed nervous systems that require glucose, a type of sugar. Our cognitive abilities may be more advanced but they also demand more sustenance. Weighing only about 3 pounds, our brains constitute a mere 2 percent of our weight but use about 20 percent of the body’s energy.30 This is why so much of our behavior is done without consciously thinking. Our minds are lazy out of necessity and seek to make shortcuts in an effort to save energy.
Similarly, our desire for salt is also explained by our ancestors’ requirements. Sodium or salt has always been an essential ingredient to our cellular health, especially for muscle cells and the cells of the nervous system, but was incredibly scarce in Pleistocene environments, where rainfall tended to leach it from the soil and rocks, washing it away into the salty ocean. Since plants do not take up sodium from the soil, it was more adaptive for humans to eat animals, which is why our desire for meat and our craving for salt were passed down from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.31
Individuals who were highly motivated to seek out sugars, fats, and salt were more likely to survive and pass on these same taste preferences to their children. Thousands of generations later, we crave sweet, fatty, and salty foods even though they are no longer scarce or as important to our modern diets, and in many ways, are counterproductive, causing diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Nonetheless, we are still so steeped in our hunter-gatherer mindset that we share these taste preferences, even when these junk food sensibilities spell trouble. An adaptive function has become potentially life threatening, but our instincts continue to take precedence over our rationalizations.
We see this in marketing success stories all the time, although it is often used to unfortunate results. McDonald’s savvy but controversial “Supersize me” campaign was a prime example of how to use human instinct to increase market value. This sales tactic was based on an evolved unconscious decision rule that one should consume fat, sugar, and salt wherever and whenever possible. This strategy is especially adaptive in an environment with limited and competitive access to resources. As much as reason tells us that these resources aren’t scarce, our instincts remind us that if we don’t have them, we risk starvation of vital nutrients, harkening back to a time when we were forced to cover almost 12 miles a day in search of food.32 Today, pulling up to a fast-food drive-through in the convenience of your automobile with a few bucks in your pocket is a relatively effortless endeavor, but though our lives have changed, our taste preferences have not. The brain circuits that were elegantly designed to solve the problems our ancestors faced have backfired on modern man.
Our penchant for overindulgence is not just limited to fast-food restaurants. The best-known slogan for Lay’s potato chips, “Betcha can’t eat just one,” helped elevate the brand to international sales success. Lay’s snacks are deliciously high in fat and salt, and the insightful slogan led a supersized sales tactic, not because it was based on consumer insight, but because it was based on one of the oldest truths of humanity. When your target audience is all humans who are all highly motivated, you have the foundation for an extremely pervasive and profitable business model or ad slogan.
Suppressing our biological drives and overcoming innately programmed behaviors, while possible, is much easier said than done. Menu calorie labeling is rapidly becoming the law of the land, but studies have shown that simply providing caloric information is not enough to reduce consumption. A Washington state study tracked food purchases at a fast-food chain for a year after it began posting calorie counts on menus, and it concluded that sales were unaffected by labeling. In New York City, the first major city to mandate the posting of fast-food calories, there are conflicting research results. When customers were asked if they believed the labeling influenced their decisions, their self-reported responses showed a dramatic effect; an overwhelming 88 percent majority said they purchased fewer calories as a result. But when actual behavior was measured by examining purchase receipts before and after calorie labeling, there was no difference. Our guilty indulgences transcend our wishful reporting.33
Advertisers can choose to better understand these triggers and customers can choose to recognize and resist them, although evolution in these instances has stacked the deck in the marketers’ favor. If you find yourself thinking about stopping for a 7-Eleven Super Big Gulp or ordering a Burger King Triple Whopper with Cheese, pause for a moment so that you can consciously contemplate the power of marketing tactics driven not just by thirst or hunger but by that little biology gizmo inside your head that commands your behavior. Likewise, only through conscious awareness can marketers understand the powerful and instinctual nature of these deeper drives and their very real impact on market economies.
To understand the human brain is to understand that we are profoundly social creatures. Our biology has driven us to commingle, and those interactions have in turn molded our biology toward even greater social strivings. The human brain evolved not just in reaction to the physical environment, but perhaps even more importantly in reaction to the social environments in which humans lived. As neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine states, “Our brains have been shaped by hundreds and thousands of years living in status conscious hierarchical groups.”34
Humans are essentially pack animals who have lived, and continue to live, in relatively small groups of people. These groups were and remain today dominance hierarchies consisting of social systems that have a pecking order of relationships based on rankings and mutually beneficial social interactions. Yet in order to prosper, we walk the delicate balance between being both altruistic and selfish, cooperative and conflicted. We are constantly seeking to assert our self-interest while remaining firmly within the good graces of the tribe.
Human nature is therefore inherently polarized and paradoxical. We are violent and aggressive yet also empathetic and moral creatures. We are hardwired both to care for others and to pursue self-interest. The hierarchies in which we’ve always lived have collectively endeavored toward the common good, in part because what was good for the group was often good for the individual as well as one’s kin. As much as the tribe was important, its main function was to ensure the survival of each individual member. We are kind to others because it serves us and ours well.
Today we work much the same way within our modern tribes. You may recognize these same tendencies in office politics. We all share the common lofty mission of corporate success to improve sales and markets and espouse the desire to treat each other with reciprocal altruism, but the hidden plot and the real goal is often one of individualistic competition and self-advancement. These devices are not unlike the evolved psychological mechanism of intrasexual competitions among men who undermine their pals for the prize of a promotion or a beautiful woman and perhaps a handsome son, or women who contrive their way into the protective hands of a high status male who will care for her and her children. Whether we know or acknowledge it, our noblest inclinations often arise from the insidious ploys of our DNA.
The daily dramas of human endeavors are the story within the story. The real purpose of the tale is to survive, flourish, protect one’s kin, and eventually proliferate our genes successfully into the next generation. To this end, we push and pull our way up and down the hierarchy, maneuvering to maintain, challenge, and lift our status through both subtle and overtly aggressive competition in which some members become submissive to higher status individuals.
Status is so important because it enables greater access to physical resources like food, shelter, material goods, clothing, and mates. Though hunter-gatherer societies seemed egalitarian in the way they distributed goods and resources, they were actually quite status conscious—although in their times, the currency was not a market share or a dollar bill, but rather the access to meat.
One of the benefits bestowed on the best hunters was having the most wives. These wives shared in the high profile fortunes of their hunter counterparts with reassuringly plentiful access to meat.35 In 2009, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reported that wild female chimpanzees were more likely to have sex with males that regularly gave them meat. “These results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis,” they wrote in an article that appeared in the journal PLoS ONE, shedding light on the time-honored tradition of the dinner date.36
Beyond the sexual, physical, and nutritional benefits, high status individuals also enjoy the emotional payoffs that come with the territory. It feels good to be important and recognized by others as having higher status. As Nobel laureate economist John Harsanyi says, “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.”37
Experimenters Robert Deaner, Amit Khera, and Michael Platt, at Duke University’s department of neurobiology, demonstrated this need for status through a study involving other primates such as macaque monkeys. These primates actually paid currency by sacrificing the fruit juice they love for a chance to look at pictures of high status individuals in their groups. Access to information about high status members is important because it’s necessary for social maneuverings that may impact one’s own status. As a result, we, like the macaques, have evolved a feel-good response to obtaining such information.38
This helps explain our own deep-seated preoccupation with celebrities, television shows like Extra and TMZ, and print publications like People Magazine and the notoriously popular tabloids. We love paying attention to high status individuals because it confers an evolutionary advantage. We lunch with important clients and movers and shakers because we want to share in their secrets as well as their company, much as we carefully choose the right spokesperson or brand ambassador so that our target can share in the social currency of their equity. Whether it’s the person on the fast track in the field of business or the field of play, we buy Air Jordan Melo sneakers or stay at Trump Tower because there is a part of us that wants to know what it’s like to be a Michael Jordan or a Carmelo Anthony or a Donald Trump.
This deep-seated motive also explains the allure of being in the know. Tried and true marketing strategies offer this privilege through such tactics as first-to-know loyalty programs for the inner circle of valued customers. It also drives the viral buzz of the mainstream as the asymmetry between insiders and outsiders pursues balance when those in the know seek to share and those left out seek to know. Campaigns that leverage and facilitate this natural feel-good response and the behavioral inclination derived from this exchange of information can efficiently spread brand messages while satisfying their customers’ needs for information in the form of social currency.
Our preeminent need to be social goes back to our deepest evolutionary need to survive and replicate. Back in the Pleistocene epoch, if you became alienated from the group, you risked losing the safety, protection, shelter, food, and sex that living in the group ensured. Rejection and subsequent ejection from the tribe would be akin to a death sentence from lack of these resources. In other words, if you got kicked out of the group, you would likely die and your genes would be effectively weeded out of the gene pool. Our goal to be social is rooted in our genes’ goals to survive. Our values are our genes’ values. To truly understand the importance of rejection to humanity is to understand the play within the play of our daily dramas.
Just as status seeking is guided by the pursuit of positive emotions, the avoidance of rejection is driven by the fear of painful physical feelings. In 2009 UCLA psychologists discovered that a gene linked with physical pain sensitivity is also associated with social pain sensitivity. They demonstrated that the mu-opioid receptor gene, which regulates the most potent pain relievers in the human body (mu-opioids), is also involved in socially painful experiences, according to the study’s co-author Naomi Eisenberger, professor of psychology and director of UCLA’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.
Eisenberger and her colleagues conducted an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine subjects’ brain activity during an interactive game of virtual ball toss. Participants believed that they were playing a game in which they would virtually (over the Internet) toss and catch a ball back and forth with two other participants, who were purportedly also in fMRI scanners at other locations. In reality, the subjects played against a computer with predetermined outcomes. Initially the subjects were included in the game, but later they were excluded as the two virtual participants stopped throwing the ball to them.
The researchers found that when participants believed they were being snubbed by their virtual playmates, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas of the brain that are often associated with physical pain, were activated, and individuals with a specific variation of the mu-opioid receptor gene showed greater activity in these regions. As Baldwin Way, the lead author on the research paper puts it, “The feeling of being given the cold shoulder by a romantic interest or not being picked for a schoolyard game of basketball may arise from the same circuits that are quieted by morphine.”39 These findings support the common belief that rejection “hurts.”
The overlap of social pain and physical pain makes sense. “Social connection is linked to survival,” Eisenberger indicates, and thus “feeling physical pain by not having social connections may be an adaptive way to keep them. Over the course of evolution, the social attachment system, which ensures social connection, may have actually borrowed some of the mechanisms of the pain system to maintain social connections.”40 In a follow-up study, Eisenberger and her team found that taking Tylenol reduced neural sensitivity to the pain of rejection.41 If you get stood up on a date or haven’t been invited to a party, try taking Tylenol instead of drowning your sorrows in Budweiser or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
Brands are not just products; they are the means to acceptance in social groups, whether their power is in high-end brands like Mercedes that provide entry into the elite, or low-priced options like Target and Ikea that uplift the populace with a sense of style and cachet typically afforded to the more privileged. This underscores the importance of building brands from the core, nurturing the religious-like zeal of hard-core Sony PlayStation gamers, Ducati motorcycle loyalists, or Grey Goose aficionados, whose dedication to their brand is not only driven by their deep-seated need for acceptance by aspirational groups but also the avoidance of real physical pain.
One of the most important neuroscience discoveries in the past two decades has been that of mirror neurons. In the early 1990s, Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team of graduate students at the University of Parma, Italy, were investigating the motor system of the brain, the part of the central nervous system involved in movement, when they came upon a surprising find.42
To better understand the human brain, they were studying the electrical activity of the motor neurons of a macaque monkey. Using needle-thin electrodes, the researchers were researching the activity of the premotor cortex, the part of the brain involved in the planning and initiation of movement. As expected, these motor neurons would fire when the monkey moved an arm to grab an object.
One hot summer day something completely unexpected happened. The team left for lunch and they forgot to turn off the equipment, leaving the monkey hooked up while they were gone. When they returned, one of the graduate students working with Rizzolatti began licking an ice cream cone he had brought back, while the monkey watched longingly. To the surprise of the scientists, every time the researcher licked his ice cream, the electrodes signaled a spike in activity of the motor neurons of the premotor cortex of the macaque, despite the fact that the monkey remained motionless. It was “monkey see, monkey do” but, instead of physically doing the action, the macaque was imitating the same activity in its own mind by firing the same motor neurons and imagining eating the ice cream cone.
Rizzolatti’s team serendipitously discovered that day that empathy, that is, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, is mediated by neurons in the brain’s motor system. These “mirror neurons,” as Rizzolatti named them, give humans the capacity for shared experiences by enabling us to project ourselves into the minds, feelings, and actions of others. He explained, “We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions, and emotions of others. Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”43
Mirror neurons help us form the basis for what behavioral scientists refer to as “theory of mind.” This is the ability to understand the motives, intentions, and actions of others in an effort to develop theories about what they will do and why they will do it. They let us be both altruistic and competitive, not only giving us empathy to feel others’ pain, but also an understanding of their truer, and sometimes more deceptive, intentions. They make us tear up with sorrow for the misfortunes of our comrade or see through the thinly veiled kowtowing of our enemies. Mirror neurons are the key to building empathy and understanding, which comes from observing and interacting with individuals whether via the media or firsthand.
Mirror neurons give humans not only the capacity for shared experiences and better understanding but also the ability to learn through imitation, enabling the cultural transmission of ideas and experiences. This process automatically helps us pass along valuable information and abilities to others by facilitating the infectious mimicry of brand rituals, fads, and trends that marketers hope to spread throughout culture. Because we are hardwired to mimic these actions, these repeated reflexes become learned behaviors. Playing the game Punch Buggy or Slug Bug by lightheartedly jabbing your friend every time you see a Volkswagen Beetle, or squeezing a lime into the neck of a Corona bottle, or eating the middle of an Oreo cookie first are all examples of hardwired brand rituals of imitation lubricated by the contagious reflexes of our mirror neurons.44
These neurons help explain the meteoric growth of reality television, which now comprises more than half of the network programming in the United States and nearly three-quarters in the world market according to Nielsen Media Research.45 That’s because the more real the characters appear and the less contrived the plot, the more we actually feel those same experiences and those same feelings.
Survivor leveraged human insights on many primal levels to become one of the most watched, influential, and enduring reality shows, rating in the top 10 during its first eleven seasons in America. Through real people and unscripted storylines, Survivor reconnects modern, sedentary TV audiences to their nomadic tribal past, transporting the viewer via the automatic reflexes of our mirror neurons to relive the dramas of our ancient competitive and cooperative tribal rituals. Ordinary people like us are left in remote places to create their own primitive dominance hierarchies through the evolved psychological mechanisms of coalition formation, territoriality, and collective decision making.
Burger King capitalized on this human insight to prove to America just how much people loved the Whopper when it introduced the “Whopper sacrifice”: Delete ten friends on Facebook and receive a free Whopper. Two hundred thousand friends were sacrificed in just over a week and 35 million free media impressions challenged the concept of Facebook, which ultimately forced Burger King to take it down in a short-lived but convincing demonstration of the attention-getting allure of social rejection.46
The power of mirror neurons has also captivated the big screen with the original reality horror movies Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Ironically, these movies increased both viewer engagement and revenue while decreasing production costs. The choice of using hand-held, grainy black-and-white video and stationary surveillance cameras made these movies more believable and more real, as if it was truly happening to us. Launched in the summer of 1999, the Blair Witch social media campaign was one of the first viral Internet campaigns. Forbes.com recently rated this campaign as the best social media effort of all time. Web users speculated whether or not the story of young documentary makers lost in the woods was really true. Fake newspaper postings and police photos of their missing car had people wondering and waiting for more, pulling them into the digital media frenzy as if it were an unfolding live news story.47
Despite a pittance of investments to make these motion pictures, they had a huge return on investment. The Blair Witch Project made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for “Top Budget: Box Office Ratio” (for a mainstream feature film), costing a mere 22,000 to make and generating 240.5 million, a ratio of a single dollar spent for every 10,931 made. Paranormal Activity was shot for a reported 15,000, yet has raked in 194 million worldwide with limited marketing.
Paranormal Activity’s success was driven largely by online buzz and word of mouth. “On the social networking sites, everybody’s talking about how freaking scary this movie is,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com. He added, “This does not happen every day. This is literally capturing lightning in a bottle.” As Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore said, “This movie doesn’t lend itself to a big, giant marketing campaign. This movie is an old-fashioned word-of-mouth movie.” When you leverage human truths as well as these movies did, humans do the marketing for you.48
Similarly, our team at Deutsch LA reintroduced Americans to the game of Punch Bug with a twist and renamed it Punch Dub with a new set of rules. That is, if you see any V-dub, not just the Beetle, give someone you know a playful punch. Within months after launching the campaign, over a third of the adult population reported having played the game.49 If brand equity is essentially positive memories, triggering these recollections unleashes its power. By dusting off and reigniting a beloved brand ritual, we were able to fondly make the brand top of mind, culturally relevant, and have people do the marketing for us. In 2010, Sands Research, a leading neuromarketing firm, using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and eye-tracking data gathered from study participants, found our Super Bowl commercial to be the most effective of all the ads tested from Super Bowl XLIV using its proprietary Neuro Engagement Factor (NEF)™. As Dr. Stephen Sands, chairman and chief science officer at Sands Research stated, “Volkswagen’s ‘Punch Dub’ was our top scorer this year with a commercial that engaged viewers in virtually all of the frames. The company turned viewers into ‘Volkswagen detectors’ by having them look for and anticipate the cars—VW really maximized their entire 30 seconds.”50
Part of the popularity of the reality boom is the extent to which people identify and bond with similar others. The tribal groups in which we evolved consisted of individuals who were a lot like ourselves and many of whom were kin. When we see people like us on television programs or in advertising, for instance, we relate more closely to the ebb and flow of their daily dramas. We share more in the tension of their conflicts and rewards of their successes. Today we still long for the physical connection to others that we so long enjoyed in close-knit hunter-gatherer societies. Today’s brands and new media provide the means to satisfy some of these sensibilities, even if they are as much a part of our imagination as they are part of our real life.
So strong is our need for social attachment that it builds the structure of our societies and markets. This innately social tendency extends out, moving from our instincts to our families to our tribes, city-states, nation-states, and beyond. It creates the relationships between friends and communities. It is the mortar between less intimate groups like the religion we practice, the political party we support, the digital communities we visit, and the brands that we buy. We are all seeking identity and identification with social groups, which is why, especially in technology, marketing a sense of community has become the brand imperative. We are not PC users, we are part of the Dell community; we are not just players of PlayStation or Xbox, we are a part of those gaming communities.
But how can a faceless corporation create a common connection with people when human bonds are rooted in identifying with a face and a real person? Marketers have learned to bridge this chasm by focusing their efforts on the creation of brands that engender identity meaning and tribal attachment. Our purchase affiliations with strong iconic brands like Apple, Harley-Davidson, Target, and Nike are not just a reflection of our interest in a product or service, but also an identification with a group of like-minded people bound by a common sense of purpose—Apple for the creative-minded, Harley for the free-spirited, Target for the smartly hip, and Nike for the achievers, to name a handful. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller indicates that brands are modern day manifestations of our need to “display traits” and flaunt “fitness indicators” that advertise our biological potential as mates and friends.51 We all want to be part of the winning team and the in-crowd, and brands hold the passage beyond the velvet ropes of the social clubs of today’s markets and today’s societies.
The Internet now enables the connection to far-flung virtual tribes way beyond the social circles of our hunter-gatherer origins. These online communities provide marketers with a robust social-science laboratory that provides an unprecedented view and measurement of marketing effectiveness. The evidence to date strongly suggests an evolution-inspired viewpoint of behavior change in market economies. We need to build on the powerful unconscious patterns of behavior throughout human history, recognizing how our minds are designed to solve problems of the past. The paradox of human behavior in the digital age is that we are changing more quickly than we could ever imagine, but we are also repeating the same predictable patterns that have dominated most of our species’ existence. To say that the Internet is changing our behavior is perhaps the biggest of understatements, but despite these changes, it’s ironic how remarkably similar our behavior remains in the digital realm to that of the old hunter-gatherer past.
For example, eBay is one of the first and most successful online businesses. What eBay did was provide a modern digital translation of one of the most deeply ingrained human behaviors throughout history: our need to share and exchange resources. Quite literally, eBay is a web of indebtedness, a self-monitored community that enables individual people, givers and takers, to share through “social proof,” “reciprocal altruism,” and “collective decision making.” Vendors can rise up the ranks to a position of trusted status through mutual exchanges of satisfaction and the reciprocal exchanges of approval or disapproval of buyers and sellers in the social group.
Social media is among the hottest topics and the fastest growing media not just because of advances in digital technology, but because our brains are designed to be social. Today, Facebook is used by 901 million people52 in 70 languages worldwide.53 The tremendous success of Facebook is largely because it is the most direct online interpretation of the concept of tribe. Through virtual alliances and a series of back and forth friend requests, we can discover and create our own digital tribe. We can explore our place in the pecking order based on those who accept or reject our friendship, the thumbs-up approval of ideas and thoughts we might share, and the positive or negative commentary in response to our posts. Talking to someone privately by email is one thing, but wall postings let us have public conversations with a member of our tribe, introducing a social dynamic into interpersonal interaction. The dialogue becomes a message to the collective tribe as much as it is a communication to an individual tribesperson. The online acceptance or rejection of a tribe’s member is made powerfully simple through the click of button.
Facebook evolves the human need to seek alliances and form coalitions unbounded by geography or proximity. It reunites our old tribe members and enables heretofore impractical and impossible new associations with new groups we aspire to join. Facebook helps those feeling the pain of alienation in the real world by connecting them through the virtual world, allowing people to advertise their potential as friends and mates through personalized content and user profiles.
The growth and success of mobile apps like Twitter now enable our affiliations to become truly nomadic. Twitter raises our deep need to feel constant attachment to others, even when we’re on the go, while empowering our own bid to position ourselves atop the pecking order of the dominance hierarchies that we create virtually. Deep down we all want others to acknowledge, admire, or better yet follow our lead. So deep is our need for status that when the prestigious One Club, whose mission is to acknowledge excellence in advertising, invited top digital creative types to award the best of the digital decade from 2000 to 2010, heading the list was none other than the infamous Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s “Subservient Chicken” for Burger King. This app enabled web users to dominate a lowly man dressed in a chicken suit through text commands that made the obsequious birdman do just about anything you asked.54 Why just order chicken when you can simply order one around? And Foursquare, a location-based social networking site, enables users to prove their attendance at high status happenings by checking in at concerts, parties, and sports events so that they can display badges of their experiential achievement in the real world to their tribe in the digital world.
We are human. And being human, we are driven by our enduring instincts and prepackaged proclivities. To narrowly define a person as a consumer is to neglect our deepest strivings. When marketers tempt someone’s biology with a free sample of Häagen-Dazs, when people display their in-crowd whereabouts on Foursquare, or when some people don’t just talk on their phone and instead choose to signal the proud badge of an iPhone . . . take a moment to recognize the ancient circuitry of our Pleistocene past living within all of us much like it did thousands and thousands of years ago.